manifested; but it is not possible to get rid of them. The belief, that faulty character can so organize itself socially as to get out of itself a conduct which is not proportionately faulty, is an utterly baseless belief. You may alter the incidence of the mischief, but the amount of it must inevitably be borne somewhere. Very generally it is simply thrust out of one form into another; as when, in Austria, improvident marriages being prevented, there come more numerous illegitimate children; or as when, to mitigate the misery of foundlings, hospitals are provided for them, and there is an increase in the number of infants abandoned; or as when, to insure the stability of houses, a Building Act prescribes a structure which, making small houses unremunerative, prevents due multiplication of them, and so causes overcrowding; or as when a Lodging-House Act forbids this overcrowding, and vagrants have to sleep under the Adelphi-arches, or in the Parks, or even, for warmth's sake, on the dung-heaps in mews. Where the evil does not, as in cases like these, reappear in another place or form, it is necessarily felt in the shape of a diffused privation. For, suppose that by some official instrumentality you actually suppress an evil, instead of thrusting it from one spot into another—suppose you thus successfully deal with a number of such evils by a number of such instrumentalities—do you think these evils have disappeared absolutely? To see that they have not, you have but to ask, Whence comes the official apparatus? What defrays the cost of working it? Who supplies the necessaries of life to its members through all their gradations of rank? There is no other source but the labor of peasants and artisans. When, as in France, the administrative agencies occupy some 600,000 to 700,000 men, who are taken from industrial pursuits, and, with their families, supported in more than average comfort, it becomes clear enough that heavy extra work is entailed on the producing classes. The already-tired laborer has to toil an additional hour; his wife has to help in the fields as well as to suckle her infant; his children are still more scantily fed than they would otherwise be; and, beyond a decreased share of returns from increased labor, there is a diminished time and energy for such small enjoyments as the life, pitiable at the best, permits. How, then, can it be supposed that the evils have been extinguished or escaped? The repressive action has had its corresponding reaction; and, instead of intenser evils here and there, or now and then, you have got an evil that is constant and universal.
When it is thus seen that the evils are not got rid of, but, at best, only redistributed, and that the question in any case is, whether redistribution, even if practicable, is desirable, it will be seen that the "must-do-something" plea is a quite insufficient one. There is ample reason to believe that, in proportion as scientific men carry into this most involved class of phenomena the methods they have successfully adopted with other classes, they will see
